Wednesday, October 5, 2011

KDE Mobile and Gluon presentations at the Linux Mobile Summit (Also few words about Plasma Active and Mer)

Hey there! =)

Unfortunately, I have been busy recently with a couple of real life issues, like moving into a new apartment, while simultaneously burning out a bit in my full time job. That is because of the continuous beheading that outsiders can also feel about our Harmattan project where we have tried for a long time to ship the best platform ever, and it is now fading away. I do wish to give my thanks to Nokia for providing the opportunity to take part in such a great project (as Harmattan is)! Luckily enough, I was able to attend a very fruitful and amazing summit during the last few days to get a bit away from the troubles and chill out a bit with very friendly people in a cozy environment.

General information about the Linux Mobile Summit conference

The event took place in Oulu, Finland, on 4-5th of October 2011. The city of Oulu is located in the northern part of the Baltic Sea, about 200 km from the Arctic Circle. The program consisted of lectures provided by invited industrial and academic experts, community presentations selected from the open call and demos on MeeGo and other Mobile Linux systems given by the regional groups, invited FRUCT teams and selected from the open call. I am really thankful for the organizers and decision makers for giving me the opportunity to talk about my two favorite ongoing leisure projects: Gluon and KDE Mobile. All my respect goes to the organizers, too. I am really happy about their support for such brilliant events as this. You can find the detailed program for the event at the following link: http://fruct.org/MobileLinux2

FRUCT (organizer community) logo for the event

The first day, KDE Mobile presentation

Unfortunately, I had a very bad start of the whole traveling and conference as around 02:00 am, I felt asleep. The problem is that my plane was scheduled to leave at 06:20 am, and I was unable to wake up before 05:00 am, even when friends were calling me on the phone... :) You can imagine my trip from the bed to the airport. :p I did not have time for a shower, I forgot my identity card at home before the airplane trip (luckily enough, I had my driver's license with me :). After the arrival and welcome speeches, my colleague gave a very good presentation about "How to survive with Platform Security on Harmattan". The next presentation was mine about the KDE Mobile project. I had had a very rough weekend beforehand. I was very busy with the presentation, which you can now find here if you would like to check it out (Let me know if you need the source for any re-invocations or so): http://fruct.org/sites/default/files/kde-mobile-laszlo-papp.pdf

Many thanks go to Eugene Trounev for the background of the presentation.

KAlgebra Mobile on N9

I had to hold back a meeting with some buddies because of the heavy work on this, but it was worth it for me after all because of the very positive feedback. One interesting point about the presentation was that, after submitting my slides to the event organizers, I noticed the announcement of the MeeGo Reconstructed project:http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/meego-dev/2011-October/484215.html

After reading it, I thought it would be very cool to speak a bit about that to other participants. Mainly because, regarding the KDE Mobile project, it can provide a very useful base OS for Plasma Active, for instance. I wanted to talk about a couple of things: History, Plasma Active (shallowly), Qt5, KDE frameworks, KDE on Harmattan, Android, Mer and so forth.

The First day, the social event

After the many interesting and impressive presentations, the organizers were kind enough to take care of us and we got transported to a local place with excellent Sauna opportunity (Real Finnish way of enjoying the sauna ;) and we had free drinks (beer, but also soft drinks) and pizza. More importantly, pretty much fun everywhere. Had a good chat about insane things with the local site manager of a subcontractor company and with many other guys. :) Having fun after the dinner! ;)

Having fun after the dinner! ;)

The second day, the Gluon presentation

My hotel reservation was needlessly luxurious in my opinion, and I did really enjoy it. :) I have got used to cheap accommodations in the past because of the university apartment. Also, KDE Developer Sprints: where we tried to keep the costs at minimum for the KDE e.V. board. My company sponsored the hotel room for me, so I am really thankful and happy about that. I had a small walk around in the city before the long conference day. I believe I was even a bit late; I missed the first presentation. :P The second presentation of the day was about Gluon, so I could present our vision, current project state and future plans. You can find the presentation on the following link:http://fruct.org/sites/default/files/gluon-oulu2011.pdf

Note that, it is just a slight modification of the Gluon presentation slides that Dan and Arjen produced for this year's Desktop Summit in Berlin. All my respect to them for providing me the presentation, so I could concentrate more on my KDE Mobile presentation during the weekend. There were more people interested in game development (There was even another game development related presentation that day), so we could share our visions and paradigms. On the other hand, there were more presentations about Social Desktop, Collaboration and similar things. I could also present the Open Collaboration Services to them that we have been using in Gluon. They were all very fruitful discussions and I could really get to know very high-skilled and cool people. Unfortunately, I could not show the demos, for instance the Games we have built on Gluon as examples for the Community because I could not use my own laptop, but some people came to my place after the presentations, and I could show them some games.

Gluon Space Invaders on N950

The Second day, the end of the conference, Plasma Active and Mer

We had large hugs with other participants and they told me they are looking forward to seeing the KDE Mobile, Gluon and Plasma Active projects in the future. I feel it as respect, and it makes me happy. :p Actually, it sounds funny, but I "could not" leave the venue after the conference since I started listening to the ongoing Plasma Active and Mer IRC meeting on my N9 Nokia phone.

MeeGo Reconstructed

It has been a very hot and fresh topic with many ideas and enthusiastic people over there. It has been a bit hard for me to follow every post, but I think I got the gist of the discussion. By the way, it will be "repeated" this Thursday if you could not participate, 18:00 UTC if I am not mistaken. It sounds like a very interesting project, and I hope they can really build a commercial future for it, and also a nice community. Here you can find Aaron's invitation for the IRC meeting:http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/10/meegonext.html

Unfortunately, there were also some drawbacks in the organization:
1) It is a pity: a group photo was not taken
2) The presentations were not recorded, not even with simple audio recorders
3) There were not many photos taken during the presentations, the social event and other times. However I started taking some pictures about the presentations with my N9 the second day, that I will publish later.

All in all, it has been a very nifty summit. I hope I can join the next conference in November which will be held in Tampere. It is the next bit of the series from FRUCT.

I am really sorry for the long blog entries, but it seems when I start typing, I can not easily stop. ;)